


Rome

by rm (arem)



Category: Gattaca (1997)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-24
Updated: 2009-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-05 04:17:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/37732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arem/pseuds/rm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jerome Morrow has never wanted anything, ever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rome

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ignaz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignaz/gifts).



Jerome Morrow's middle name is not Eugene, and he is not afraid of heights, but once he says these things they might as well be true.

His mother called him Eugene, when he was small, before he started school. It was the name of a cricketer she had liked for a few years after he was born, and it is the way of things still that boys are given sports heroes before they understand the idea of either _sport_ or _hero_.

Once Jerome was old enough to understand – once he started school, once he understood that cricket was, amongst his peer group, more fashionable to spectate than to play – he was embarrassed. When his mother called him Eugene he felt small.

But she never stopped doing it. She didn't do it all the time, of course; she did respect his dignity in some small fashion and once he, aged eight-and-a-quarter-if-you-please, went off to boarding school he didn't see her, or his father, that much anyway.

But when he was poorly and when she was scared, when she was actually there, she would call him Eugene, and Jerome knew that meant she loved him, no matter how conjured and alien he was, a boy essentially ordered off a list, the best of his parents, and apparently nothing like either of them at all.

Slowly, at school, Jerome came to know that everyone, it seemed, felt the same way, as if the best of any pair was not meant to be. Little boys in little suits who looked just like their fathers.

By twelve, the were boys four and five to a room, rooms clustered like flowers and every one too close, too neat, too bored, because this is how they were built. Everyone always made sure to put their jumpers away.

Jerome wondered at it, if parents selected them all for _well behaved_ and never told anyone. He even asked his mother once, and she confessed that when she was a girl all the children wondered if parents could read their minds and that it was a secret you couldn't learn until you were older.

Jerome knew she was laughing at him. His father never even bothered with that.

At fourteen, boys fumbled in the dark. As if on schedule, as if by rote. Jerome found it distasteful, because in this too, it seemed no one cared. It was only practice anyway, like the tedium of track and swim training. It wasn't a real thing, and it didn't matter. Boys practiced for girls they would meet at family holiday parties. Jerome swam in practice for meets he would win anyway.

Jerome fell in love. Which was stupid stupid stupid, beat his head into the wall stupid. It was only practice and boredom and cigarettes out on the back steps (he would never get cancer, not ever, not _ever_, so he could do this one terrible thing that just didn't matter at all), but William was pretty and fair and grinned like he actually cared about something.

He didn't. Not really. He cared about being care-free, so much so that he drove everyone half-mad with his wonderful fake spectacles with the plain glass lenses in them, until his father showed-up unexpectedly because his mother had _died_ and cracked him across the face with the back of his hand in front of the everyone in History of the Ancient World.

The glasses had gone flying across the room, and after, William always looked at Jerome, at _Eugene_ – dammit, he wanted his mother, he did – with hate, as if he had somehow betrayed him.

William never kissed him again after that, although they had shared cigarettes sometimes still.

In university, Jerome dated the best girls. Tall and cold and sly and clever, they taught him how to be mean. Vicious, crueler than them. It was interesting. It was difficult. It had finesse. It was so much better than boys just pushing each other down into the mud. At least swimming was clean.

Jerome loved how when he swung his arms to loosen his shoulders people were scared of him. Like the perfect triangle of his shoulders and chest, like all these things he couldn't help about himself, could somehow devour them. They couldn't. It was too much work. He didn't _care_.

The Olympics were very boring. It was two weeks of vacation where no one let him do what the bloody hell he wanted and it was even more annoying than the summer spent in Italy at a villa outside Rome with his father after he'd finished boarding school. He hadn't wanted to spend his time fishing, but beggars, his father had said, can't be choosers.

Jerome had laughed in his face. Jerome Morrow didn't beg. Wouldn't ever. Hadn't needed to. Except with William, who hadn't even cried when his mother died and his father slapped him and broke his glasses.

Jerome is interested in broken things. Jerome is interested in himself.

Jerome breaks his back in an entirely stupid way and likes to tell lies about it. There is romance (a lost idea – swab this, test that, and everyone so cold except for cigarettes) in saying it was a horseback riding accident; Jerome fucking hates horses. And car accidents are not his fault. Suicide attempt (and it _wasn't_ actually, he'd have done it better; Jerome _Eugene_ Morrow cannot fail) bring disbelief and false sympathy.

He wonders if parents ever select children purposely for a propensity towards self-injury.

It would save so much _time_.

Jerome Morrow was at a party. He was drunk out of his mind. And beautiful. Jerome Morrow has always been beautiful when he is drunk. The apartment building, seven stories, is next to an embassy, four stories, and between them is a driveway.

Jerome Morrow is sitting in the open window smoking. There are two girls laughing near him, but he doesn't care. Their parents chose their laughs; the girls aren't real. One is wearing a very expensive diamond necklace. A man is leaning on the wall by the window. His name is Kenyon. He's broader than Jerome, has tousled curly honey hair, a cleft chin, a glass of scotch. He plays... something... rugby? Football? Something will balls. Not water polo. Jerome can't remember. He is very handsome. Kenyon, too.

Jerome gets up from the window, takes a step back from it. The girls have their long fingers, made to hold his cock (he wonders if men want their sons to have bigger pricks than them or not), on his shoulders. Their nails are ticking up through his hair.

He glances at Kenyon. The man raises his glass to him ever so slightly.

And Jerome says, "Open the window."

Do it, do it now, _hurry_, he tells the girls who are squealing.

"I bet I can make that roof."

Jerome runs and jumps and falls. Kenyon plays rugby, and William's mother died. Jerome's mother calls him Eugene.

This is the fall of Rome, and it means living in the States. God help him. In a wheelchair (Can we really not fix this shit yet? It is ridiculous.) with a boy who doesn't know how to dress himself. Jerome hates him.

Until they saw his legs.

Then he hates him more. Because Jerome was never brave and how dare he, how dare this boy, this ugly boy with his real and necessary spectacles (gotten rid of now, damn him, because Jerome had so wanted to _slap them off his face_) be brave, just because he is stupid.

Jerome feels cheated.

Jerome cheats.

Jerome bullies. Jerome says, "Come here, shouldn't you know what it actually feels like to _hold my cock_?"

As gambits go, it's rather pathetic. They sawed the boy's legs. Like he's going to be afraid of anything.

Jerome, now Eugene once and again, is smoking a cigarette. He glances over at Vincent, and says, "I'll tell you a secret."

Jerome, once Vincent and in the past, laughs. "What would that be?" He handles the man's piss and blood and drunken legs. There are no secrets here. None he cares about anyway.

He is going to Titan.

Eugene stretches his neck, ponders another cigarette, speaks. "I never met anyone before you who ever wanted anything," he says.

Jerome laughs and shakes his head. "Then you weren't paying attention."

This is not a secret. If Jerome-once-was had been paying attention, he wouldn't have fallen, and once, his father took him to Rome.


End file.
